I have just purchased an Apple PowerMac G4/450, 256MB RAM, 20MB IDE Hard Drive, Zip Disk and DVD-ROM. I want to install Debian Linux on it but it is proving to be a nightmare. I have read and read and read the mailing list archives but I can not get linux running. Can someone please help.
I beleive that I need to use yaboot/ybin for the newworld mac. I have download the latest versions of these from Ben and Ethan's web/ftp sites. I have tried the latest BootX with Bens kernels. It started booting the kernel but then hung. It didn't get to the stage of mounting the root filesystem compressed image. Anyway I think I want/need yaboot. Ethan recommends creating a 800K bootstrap partition. I haven't been able to find out how to do this. I have been using Drive Setup from my MacOS 9.02 CD ROM. I have been trying to partition the disk into 3 partitions (1 bootstrap, 1 MacOS, 1 Linux Home to be split up using linux fdisk). Drive setup only allows me to enter values in units of 1 MB. No big deal but if I enter 1MB, Drive Setup changes it to 32MB. How can I get 800K or 1MB instead of wasting 32MB. Is it possible ? I can download base2_2.tgz to a MacOS partition. How do I get linux to boot so I can uncompress it into my linux partition. I need to run linux fdisk first though. I have created boot floppies but I don't have an inbuilt floppy drive. I borrowed an external USB floppy from a friend but have not been successful in booting from either the root.bin image or the boot-floppy-hfs.img. Maybe I should be using the rescue.bin image. Please advise what to do. I don't have access to LinuxPPC or YellowDog Linux so I can't use any of these methods to get Linux running (nor do I want to). Thanks, Brendan Simon.
